11/20/2014

Just rediscovered this review by Adrian Searle in The Guardian, of Jane and Louise Wilson's installation A Free and Anonymous Monument from 2003. It seems to say a lot about the issues we have worked with in the Re:place project. "You are here, the work says, but also elsewhere. The world may seem alienating, but it is the only one we have. Focusing on the local, the near, the unregarded, A Free and Anonymous Monument achieves a kind of universality. Hence, I guess, the title. One might link it with other recent works - such as Gabriel Orozco's reconstruction of Carlo Scarpa's crumbling, 1952 modernist architecture at the current Venice Biennale; or the recent film work of Steve McQueen and Tacita Dean. All, more or less, have been concerned with our sense of place, with the conditions we live in, and how places inhabit us and haunt us. These artists all use - but go beyond - documentary, and invest what they do with a sense of subjective history, and, just as importantly, a sense of what it means to be in the present, which is also the place where we meet the past. That's where we are."